RE: NYC Operation Sentenel Largest Terror Drill - MARTIAL LAW

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

If this is not some crazy martial law setup preparing for a total Wall Street meltdown and deadly riots looting and killings that would ensue, I dont know what is!



FLASHBACK - NY Daily News - April 24th 2008 - Counter-terror cops t...


nypd's 'operation sentinel' to track everything - August 12, 2008 WCBS: The NYPD is working on a plan to track every single vehicle that enters Manhattan, The initiative, called "Operation Sentinel," is aimed at preventing terror attacks, With the use of cameras and radiation sensors, police plan to track anything and everything that enters the Big Apple


Aug13, 2008 - Fortress New York: New Security Measures Planned - total city lockdown

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NYC Holds Largest Ever Counterterror Exercise
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Multiple Law Enforcement Agencies Put Choke Hold On New York Harbor As Part Of 'Operation Sentinel'

Aug 15, 2008
WCBS
http://wcbstv. com/topstories/Counter. Terror. Exercise. 2. 796595....

NEW YORK (CBS) ― On Friday, the largest counterterrorism exercise in New York history took place

The NYPD and 10 other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies mounted a drill in New York Harbor to see if new high-tech equipment can detect terrorists with bombs on the high seas

Along with the U.S.
Coast Guard, there were law enforcement units from Westchester, Perth Amboy and Union County, the New York City Fire Department and the NYPD

"The exercise is to find a reported nuclear device on a vessel coming into the harbor," NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said of the event

All told, 10 agencies and 17 vessels put a so-called choke hold on traffic coming into New York Harbor under the Verrazano Bridge.
If you attempted to sail or boat through the area, you were searched

"We're trying to further develop our concept of operations as a region in protecting the waterways and ports of NYC from any acts of terrorism," said Deputy Chief Joseph McKeever, the commanding officer of the counterterrorism division

Lots of boats were boarded and searched, and the NYPD also got to test its two $750,000 high-tech radiation tracking boats that have gear so top secret CBS 2 HD wasn't allowed to shoot pictures of some of it

They are the only two like it in the country and they can detect radiation even before they board the boat

When the NYPD "Tracs" boat pulled up the to "The Last Dollar," a recreation speed boat, cops knew from their top secret devices that they would find a radiation device on board

"It was a gamma-based source," McKeever said.
"It could be used in what we term a dirty bomb today"

Friday's exercise was part of the larger "Operation Sentinel," which puts a 50-mile buffer around New York City

The hope is that while working with cops in other jurisdictions, terrorists with bombs, whether on land or sea, will be stopped well before they reach New York City



Operation Sentinel: The High-Tech Police State Takes Shape – Global...



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City Would Photograph Every Vehicle Entering Manhattan
and Sniff Out Radioactivity
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New York Times
By AL BAKER
Published: August 11, 2008

The Police Department is working on a plan to track every vehicle that enters Manhattan to strengthen the city’s guard against a potential terror attack, the department’s chief spokesman said

The proposal — called Operation Sentinel — relies on integrating layers of technologies, some that are still being perfected.
It calls for photographing, and scanning the license plates of, cars and trucks at all bridges and tunnels and using sensors to detect the presence of radioactivity

Data on each vehicle — its time-stamped image, license plate imprint and radiological signature — would be sent to a command center in Lower Manhattan, where it would be indexed and stored for at least a month as part of a broad security plan that emphasizes protecting the city’s financial district, the spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said.
If it were not linked to a suspicious vehicle or a law enforcement investigation, it would be eliminated, he said

“Our main objective would be to, through intelligence, find out about a plot before it ever got to a stage where a nuclear device or a dirty bomb was coming our way,” Mr. Browne said.
“This provides for our defense after a plot has already been launched and a device is on its way”

The proposal is one element of a 36-page plan for security, mainly focused on the site of ground zero, that Police Commissioner Raymond W.
Kelly and his counterterrorism bureau commanders have shared with the director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

For months, Mr. Kelly and his command staff have been urging the creation of a London-style surveillance system for the financial district that relies on license plate readers, movable roadblocks and 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, all linked to a coordination center at 55 Broadway.
Known as the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, the center is to open in September

At the same time, a federal Securing the Cities program is going forward: The police are creating links with law enforcement agencies within a 50-mile radius around the city.
That plan includes outfitting officers with radiation detectors to stop a nuclear or radiological threat as far from the target as possible

Operation Sentinel would combine strategies from the security initiative and Securing the Cities and use them at choke points into Manhattan

Read The Rest HERE


Machine Gun-Toting Officers To Patrol NYC Subway - M4 Carbine Rifles, MP5 Submachine Guns & Bomb Sniffing Dogs Part Of New "Torch Team" Anti-Terror Efforts - WCBS April 24, 2008

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NYC's Plan To Track Everything That Moves
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ChannelWeb
By Kevin McLaughlin

Aug 15, 2008

http://www. crn. com/security/210100235

New York City authorities are in the process of building a multi-layered security system that will allow police to keep tabs on every vehicle that enters the city using the latest imaging and radiation detection technologies.
But some security experts don't believe the project, believed to cost in excess of $120 million, will actually improve the Big Apple (NSDQ:AAPL)'s security posture
According to a report earlier this week in the New York Times, the project -- called Operation Sentinel -- will help protect lower Manhattan by capturing vehicle license plate numbers with photo and video cameras mounted on all city bridges and tunnels.
The system will also include radiation detectors aimed at preventing terrorists from being able to sneak nuclear materials -- or a radiological 'dirty bomb' -- into the city

"Our main objective would be to, through intelligence, find out about a plot before it ever got to a stage where a nuclear device or a dirty bomb was coming our way," Paul J. Brown, New York City Police Department spokesperson, told the New York Times.
"This provides for our defense after a plot has already been launched and a device is on its way"

Operation Sentinel combines multiple security technologies into an integrated, IT-style anti-terrorism 'solution' that gathers data and feeds it back into a centralized command center for analysis.
But while the solutions-oriented approach has been effective for businesses, some security experts believe that Operation Sentinel is as much about psychology as it is about technology

Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of British Telecom, sees Operation Sentinel as an example of what he calls 'security theater', a term of his own creation that refers to measures authorities put in place to make the public feel safer, even though they don't really boost security

"Someone has thought up a movie plot in their head of bad guys driving trucks into New York City," Schneier said.
"While I'm sure there are some scenarios in which this makes sense, spending for security based on movie plots is only effective if you guess the plot correctly"

Steve Hunt, principal at Hunt Business Intelligence, an Evanston, Ill.-based security research firm, said video cameras themselves are powerful deterrents, even when they're not turned on.
"The presence of a video camera, even if it's a fake one, is very often enough to change peoples' behavior," Hunt said

That's not to say that technology won't be critical to the success of Operation Sentinel.
Steady advancements in video capture technology have made license plate scanning possible, but camera placement must be perfect, and the task of analyzing images is fraught with challenges, according to security experts

One potential stumbling block has to do with transmission of video from cameras to the command center. "The underlying network infrastructure will be susceptible to the same hiccups and shortcomings of any networking and storage architecture," said Hunt.
"The quality of license plate images is so easily degraded that complete accuracy is unlikely"

Operation Sentinel is similar to 'London's Ring Of Steel' security monitoring system, which was implemented in the early 1990s in response to a rash of IRA bombings, and uses curved roads to guide cars past closed circuit television checkpoints for monitoring purposes

But because European license plates are standardized in terms of width, height, and font, they're much easier to scan than U.S.
plates, says Willem Ryan, product marketing manager at Vancouver-based surveillance systems vendor Extreme CCTV, a member of the Bosch Group

"In North America, license plate fonts and colors vary from state to state, and writing software that capable of accounting for these differences is very difficult.
The challenge is developing a powerful algorithm to account for the massive variety of plates," said Ryan

However, the technical challenges of Operation Sentinel pale in comparison to those of digging through the mountains of data that surveillance systems generate on a daily basis to find actual terrorists, according to Ken Phelan, CTO of Gotham Technology Partners, a solution provider based in Montvale, N.
J

"I think the real issue with incident response is how much data you have to go through to find something interesting.
That analysis is going to be the key challenge," said Phelan


OPERATION TORCH April 25, 2008 - Militarized police armed with M4 carbine rifles and MP5 submachine guns are coming to the New York subways to save us from the terrorists - costs $151 million

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NYPD's "Operation Sentinel" Will Photograph
Every Car Coming to Manhattan
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Gothamist
August 12, 2008

The NYPD is serious about security in this post-9/11 world, and, amongst many elements in a proposal called "Operation Sentinel,"is the plan to photograph every single car coming into NYC. The NY Times reports that the goal is to "strengthen the city’s guard against a potential terror attack.
" Vehicles would be photographed, license plates scanned, and checked for radioactivity

Cameras would be set up at bridges and tunnels. The NYPD says that if a vehicle does not appear suspicious (after running it through a databased), the information will be deleted. Previously, the NYPD has mentioned its Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, which would ultimately have 3,000 cameras in place; now the NYPD has released details of how security would be tightened up around Ground Zero.
Those plans include a dozen guard booths, specific areas where tour buses can drop off and pick up passengers, and a bomb screening center for service and delivery trucks to the World Trade Center

There are some questions about whether this is too much. A doorman told 1010 WINS, "There's a balance that needs to be had, and that needs to be constantly upheld.
How much safer is that really going to make us? We're getting closer and closer to a police state How much are civil liberties going to be encroached upon in the name of quote-on-quote security?"

http://gothamist. com/2008/08/12/nypds_operation_sentinel_will_phot...







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Black Helicopters - Free videos are just a click away

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Unmarked chopper patrols NY city from high above
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Associated Press Writer
May 23, 2008
By TOM HAYS

http://www. breitbart. com/article. php?id=D90RIHF00&show_artic...

NEW YORK (AP) - On a cloudless spring day, the NYPD helicopter soars over the city, its sights set on the Statue of Liberty

A dramatic close-up of Lady Liberty's frozen gaze fills one of three flat-screen computer monitors mounted on a console Hundreds of sightseers below are oblivious to the fact that a helicopter is peering down on them from a mile and a half away

"They don't even know we're here," said crew chief John Diaz, speaking into a headset over the din of the aircraft's engine

The helicopter's unmarked paint job belies what's inside: an arsenal of sophisticated surveillance and tracking equipment powerful enough to read license plates—or scan pedestrians' faces—from high above the nation's largest metropolis

Police say the chopper's sweeps of landmarks and other potential targets are invaluable in helping guard against another terrorist attack, providing a see-but-avoid-being-seen advantage against bad guys

"It looks like just another helicopter in the sky," said Assistant Police Chief Charles Kammerdener, who oversees the department's aviation unit

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said that no other U.
S law enforcement agency "has anything that comes close" to the surveillance chopper, which was designed by engineers at Bell Helicopter and computer technicians based on NYPD specifications

The chopper is named simply "23"—for the number of police officers killed in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks

The $10 million helicopter is just part of the department's efforts to adopt cutting-edge technology for its counterterrorism operations

The NYPD also plans to spend tens of millions of dollars strengthening security in the lower Manhattan business district with a network of closed-circuit television cameras and license-plate readers posted at bridges, tunnels and other entry points

Police have also deployed hundreds of radiation monitors—some worn on belts like pagers, others mounted on cars and in helicopters—to detect dirty bombs

Kelly even envisions someday using futuristic "stationary airborne devices" similar to blimps to conduct reconnaissance and guard against chemical, biological and radiological threats

Civil rights advocates are skeptical about the push for more surveillance, arguing it reflects the NYPD's evolution into ad hoc spy agency

"From a privacy perspective, there's always a concern that 'New York's Finest' are spending millions of dollars to engage in peeping tom activities," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union

Police insist that law-abiding New Yorkers have nothing to fear

"Obviously, we're not looking into apartments," Diaz said during a recent flight.
"We don't invade the privacy of individuals We only want to observe anything that's going on in public"

The helicopter's powers of observation come from a high-powered robotic camera mounted on a turret projecting from its nose like a periscope The camera has infrared night-vision capabilities and a satellite navigation system that allows police to automatically zoom in on a location by typing in the address on a computer keyboard

The surveillance system can beam live footage to police command centers or even to wireless hand-held devices

"The commander on the ground can see what we're seeing," Diaz said

On this flight, the helicopter used the camera to look for signs of trouble at several key transportation sites: the decks of Staten Island ferry terminal, the stanchions of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the giant air vents feeding the Lincoln Tunnel All of them passed inspection

Without leaving Manhattan airspace, the chopper also was able to get a crystal-clear picture of jetliners waiting to take off from LaGuardia Airport and to survey Kennedy International Airport's jet fuel lines, which were targeted in a plot uncovered last year

The chopper has helped track down fleeing suspects, including a recent case of a gunman who had shot his wife in Queens As officers on the ground worried about how to approach the suspect's car, the camera in the sky hovered overhead, peeked inside the vehicle and found that he had already shot and killed himself

During Pope Benedict XVI's recent visit, 23 patrolled the skies, at one point receiving a call from officers who had spotted a suspicious man with a camera on a rooftop near the pontiff's residence Diaz radioed back that it was a false alarm

"There was a modeling shoot going on," he said